Google Widens First-Party Data Onboarding; Vulnerable Cookies

Google will widen support for first-party data onboarding, Digiday’s Garett Sloane reports. “The new program lets advertisers import their customer lists to Google and market to those audiences in Gmail, search and YouTube.” It’s a move straight out of the playbooks of many other Internet companies, including Facebook. How well can CRM demand compete with keyword intent in the Google auction? More.

Cookie Exploit

If you thought cookies had a bad rap before, Carnegie Mellon’s Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT) issued a warning stating that “cookies set via HTTP requests may allow a remote attacker to bypass HTTPS and reveal private session information.” Read it here. Because it’s impossible to tell how a cookie was set, it can be used to infiltrate sibling domains. Here’s CERT’s hypothetical: Consider two domains: foo.example.com and bar.example.com. (FUBAR! Get it?) The server for foo.example.com might set a cookie for “example.com.” Consequently, that cookie can be used to access the private sessions within bar.example.com, even if it uses HTTPS. That’s an issue that even affects ostensibly secure sites like Google and Bank of America. The Stack has some additional analysis.

Your Daily Ad Block

Addressing a lamentable lack of stories on ad blocking, The Guardian’s John Naughton contemplates the topic and wonders what comes next. “The good news is that the ensuing crisis will compel us finally to look for what we should have invented decades ago, namely sustainable business models for the web. For example, it’s possible thatcryptocurrencies might enable the ‘micro-payments’ that would make users to pay a tiny amount for any article they read.” More.

Please, Please, Do No Evil

Google parent Alphabet just poached the lauded director of the National Institute of Mental Health, Thomas Insel. As noted in Insel’s interview with Antonio Regalado of the MIT Technology Review, there are clear incentives for tech companies to enter the stagnant healthcare industry (which is 20% of US GDP). Life sciences may be separated from Google within Alphabet, but there are echoes of the marketing titan behind Insel’s description of his mandate, “To get the right treatments at the right time for the right people.” Read on.